


Groundless

by recrudescence



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 19:51:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The birds are in the bushes and the wolf is at the door. Takes place after the events in Serenity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Groundless

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Fall Fandom Free-For-All in response to the following prompt: Mal and River hook up. Super-special awesome bonus points if it's done from Simon's POV while he's on the outside looking in.
> 
> Poem excepts are from Arthur Guiterman's "Everything in its Place."

All the cupboards in the galley are closed and orderly, but somewhere there are a few tins of tea biscuits that aren’t stale yet. Filching scraps from warehouses isn’t their normal fare, but they aren’t in any position to pick and choose normality anymore.

Murky lamplight casts dull pools here and there; it’s too late at night and too early in the morning for anyone in their right mind to be awake. Three of them are anyway, which is something Simon stubbornly refuses to psychoanalyze. Hands clawed, feet bare, mouth dropping agape, and nothing as simple as shortbread on his mind anymore.

The captain is stretched on the sofa with an arm over his eyes, half-drained bottle of something topaz-colored and pungent on the floor at his side. Loose limbs, tight jaw, looking as if he’d creak if he moved too suddenly, same as Serenity. The ship is plodding on as staunchly as ever, but there’s more rust streaking her joints and more cracks under the brightly painted designs Kaylee meticulously applied to the walls, as if being forced to masquerade as a Reaver ship was the final straw. The crew can’t afford much, can’t stop just anywhere, but she wears the name Serenity proud and bright, still painted on vividly as the day Inara did it. Mal won’t even consider covering it up. There aren’t many remnants of Inara left.

Just the fugitives now, along with a widow, a barely-tame animal, a hollowed-out captain, and a mechanic trying to buoy the rest of them up but buckling under their combined weight. The grease stayed on his hands for so long after the ship was set to approximate rights, no matter how much he scrubbed them; life like this, it leaves its mark on a person.

River isn’t visible at first except in contrast; dark hair, dark dress melding with the shadows, hands and face and the bare crescent of one knee standing in sharp white contrast. Mal mutters something and he hears his sister laugh, light and musical. She picks at the folds of her skirt, the dark-tanned plane of a palm that isn’t hers disappearing underneath it. “You’ve seen me.” They all have, there in that box, but no one’s ever mentioned that before.

This is what he spent years taking care of and protecting and trying to make whole again. River makes her own decisions now and if one of those ends with her being ordered off the ship, that’s only the price of autonomy. Never mind that there are still prices on their heads and things are tight on the ship as it is with no full-time pilot and Zoe more taciturn than ever. Simon can’t fathom what his function would be on the ship without her.

Robotic words, trembling voice, young and coaxing. “Warmth provides a pleasurable sensation.” The squeaking of couch cushions, springs. Simon stock-still where he’s shadowed on the threshold between the galley and the hall. Too dim to see much, too silent not to hear much.

Propriety dictates that it’s inappropriate to be watching, since even being a brotherly bulwark has its limits, but she could get hurt taking this gamble, or she could sense him there, can sense everything if she puts her mind to it. Seeing her taking risks like this, it’s disturbing because it’s too much like who she was—impulsive, intractable—and not the right milieu or situation for that kind of behavior. He supposes if given the opportunity she could say the same for him.

The lurid red wound from Miranda cinched into a small neat scar, one to match the mark on Kaylee’s stomach. He spends too many nights holding onto her tightly and trying to disappear, putting his mouth on her before he can speak and risk ruining everything. Smelling oil and metal under the citrus-sweet perfume that was a New Year’s gift from Inara and trying to ignore it. Doing his best to appropriate a way of living he wasn’t ever meant to understand, like adolescents from home who would scream themselves hoarse at Asphyxia concerts and buy shredded clothing, couture interpretations of poverty. He used to look down his nose at anyone that oblivious.

Their mother would probably look down her nose at both of them now, maybe slap a comb into River’s hand and haul him into the sitting room for a maternal interrogation. Visions picked whole from a life he doubts he’ll ever return to. He can’t remember what color the sitting room’s walls were.

“Every morning,” says River’s voice, “when you wake up, you have ten fingers on your hands and two eyes on your face. And you sit in bed and wonder why you can’t feel or see anything. But it’s all right. I can give you mine.” There are ten ragged-nailed fingers scooping into the drabness of his sister’s dress and Mal’s face is hidden by darkness. River, back bowed, clucking over him like the bony kitten they found once, bemusedly perched outside of a metro shuttle. She’d been seven and certain Simon could fix anything.

“Ain’t so much a matter of that,” starts Mal, scarcely audible at all, not sounding a thing like himself, and Simon can see River ducking down to silence him before she does it.

Humming something low and delicate, River’s murmuring merging with the sound of fabric being shifted over skin. “The skeleton is hiding in the closet as it should. The needle's in the haystack and the trees are in the wood.”

His hand closes over hers, swallowing the smallness of it easily. Like the matryoshka dolls Simon had come across her drawing all those months ago, fitting into each other perfectly. All but the littlest, the most resilient, the only one that can’t be opened. She doesn’t pull away.

Mal’s face is tucked against her temple, the bare curve of his spine looking more pronounced in this lighting than under the infirmary’s fluorescents.

“The worm is in the apple and the clam is on the shore.”

Breath stuttering, shoulders shuddering, River’s forehead gleaming placidly pale in the night, mouth parted for a kiss that doesn’t come. Simon steps back, too late. Graciously, she lets here eyes coast over him without acknowledgement.

“The birds are in the bushes and the wolf is at the door.”

Furtively, parenthetically, he remembers who she was, who she still is—his sister, graceful feet and bird-thin bones. He goes to bed hungry and doesn’t think anything of it.

\--

_“I started to teach myself Cree today. Dr. Loesser helped me find a data stick for it.” Simon jabbed a finger at her ribs, grinning when she shrieked. She was thirteen and he spoke the lexicon of her body fluently._

“Dr. Loesser’s an idiot. I highly doubt you can learn much of anything from him.”

“Because you’re a narcissist and you don’t think anyone else is worth my time,” River told him. “Can **you** speak Cree?”

Simon shrugged. “I could learn.”


End file.
